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26 July 2012

Total Cholesterol - It is not a predictor of heart disease

After I posted on Cholesterol and Triglycerides, I was asked by my friends to give more details on why total cholesterol level does not matter in the risk of developing heart disease. I think, this video below, summarises this problem very well.

"In the case of diet and heart disease, Ancel Keys's hypothesis that cholesterol is the agent of atherosclerosis was considered the simplest possible hypothesis, because cholesterol is found in atherosclerotic plaques and because cholesterol was relatively easy to measure. "But as the the measurement technology became increasingly more sophisticated, every one of the complications that arose has implicated carbohydrates rather than fat as the dietary agent of heart disease."